The Harper House Lesson

Flash fiction

I didn’t know what to do, so I ran—in these Oxfords—to the cemetery. It was autumn. The sun had retired early, and the air was dense with the dead and dying. It made my nose run less than the pieces of forgotten students turned dust in the library.

Death is so romantic, and so is poison, like a promise, like the coming of night. I pinched a clump of frizzled hair into my mouth, let it wet with saliva, then sucked, indulging in the childhood habit as I strode through the cultivated churchyard on campus, full of cracked headstones from centuries prior.

Flushed in face and under my tights despite the needling chill, my tell-tale heart needed to brag to the ghosts about what I’d done. I tripped twice on the way (cobblestones). (Moreover, I had not slept).

I found the filthy angel, blackened with time and with wings outstretched over the mausoleum of the HARPER clan. I’d always liked that name, etched in stone over Statue of Liberty shaded doors, more than mine.

It was bold to come here, of all places. But no one was around aside from birds on bare branches, exclaiming uselessly at the gray moon. Soon, Morgan Harper would join her family here in eternal slumber. I remembered when, smirk on her perfect lips, she told me so—well, someone in front of me. She didn’t know it would be so soon.

A gust hit my back and gave me a gossamer veil of hair. Bowing my head as if revering the Harpers’ graves, I inhaled it deeply, a world with one less Harper. One less bloodsucking, opportunistic, dimpled blonde who took everyone and everything. Yes, that’s the story.

Was it that simple? Was her existence just too much? Did the “C” on my Paradise Lost analysis break me? Or was it when Dr. Kessler called Morgan’s contributions to the discussion “Stellar! Demonstrating a surgeon’s attention to detail,” inside the library named after her grandfather? I think it was dumber than simplicity, the same impulse that made me carve curses into the bathroom walls with my grandpa’s pocket knife.

Knowing Morgan, she’d fantasized about her funeral, about dying young. Oh, the fanfare. The flowers, the music, as if she was marrying Death and he would consider himself blessed and blubber at the altar.

“You’re welcome,” I whispered, and the dirty angel shifted its head to acknowledge me.

Wind sent leaves darkened with decay into a dreamy, moonlit waltz. It was getting colder. But I would bask in my triumph, in the sheer force of my will, my American ingenuity, my gumption. HARPER was a name that could be carved into and made to crumble.

When the idea came to me to put thallium salt in her tea, it didn’t feel like I was losing my mind. It felt like I was getting it back. Sneaking into the chemistry lab would be worth every lost strand of hair.

Morgan’s initial symptoms would develop tomorrow or the day after. But for now, she would sip on the tea Spencer prepared for her in her stainless steel thermos, unaware it was coated in tasteless, lethal, metal dust. He would be implicated, because he was her boyfriend. And studying chemistry.

A muffled rustling whispered to me. I spun around, but saw nothing living. Then I heard the low, heavy scraping of stone against stone. Inside the HARPER House, orange light began to glow, the color of filaments in an incandescent light bulb, breaking through the mausoleum cracks and into cool night. I stepped back, but the rustling crystalized into the clacking of shoes, the light shone brighter, and voices rose, cheerful and relaxed. I stumbled back, landing on my book-stuffed backpack. I heard glasses clink. Sitting up, I tugged on my hair, wondering whether this was the start of my haunting.

There was a party inside that mausoleum. Jazz played on a hiccupping record, at first timid, then with a searing saxophone. I looked around again; the cemetery seemed a changed and distant place. I shivered, gathering myself the best I could and approached the door to the HARPER House, under their dark angel.

“Come in!” chirped a bright, Trans-Atlantic voice.

I nearly fell forward. I called “hello,” foolishly, and the voices inside bubbled up in unified, sitcom laughter. Then I, too, laughed.

For once, I was invited. I remember how Chandler abandoned our spring break hiking plans for Morgan’s lake house. Morgan, the genius. Morgan, the gorgeous. Morgan, the cool girl, tanning on her father’s boat, cocktail in hand, tight and lax in all the right places. That reality was toxic to me; it was killing me, the fact that Morgan Harper was living.

I think I used to love her, and I didn’t know I could feel that way about a woman. Not that it was special. Everyone was obsessed with her; it wasn’t normal. Finally, I was freeing myself and doing everyone else a favor.

“Your martini is ready, doll,” a man cooed from inside the tomb. “Stirred with a lemon twist!”

I ran a hand over my disheveled hair and adjusted my plaid headband. I wasn’t dressed for a party, and I assumed this one would be of a high caliber—dripping with golden, art deco geometry.

Possessed, I pulled the mausoleum doors open until they hit the columns. Light poured out, warm and wrong. It was like Gatsby himself exhaled into my face—lemon, sparkle, powder and tapered mustaches, then a pop and fizzle into silence.

I took echoing steps forward, past shut tombs on my left and right. The dust undisturbed. Bodies at rest. Peaceful. What justice was there in that? I searched for citrus, for glimmers—hardly evidence of suffering or penance in the afterlife.

Something hot lodged itself in my throat, choking me as I pushed on the lid of a tomb, gritting my teeth. I wanted to penetrate it, get inside and see, but nothing budged, the old stone scratching my soft fingers and palms, long made by useless years of study. Study was my sole salvation. Others had so much more, so much more—and at a shorter, downhill distance. They were more solid than the rest of us—more real. Even after death!

I gave up on pushing the tomb’s lid, breathing too hard. Then I heard the breath of another, out of sync. Morgan Harper stood in the columned doorway, eyes shiny wide and mouth slack, straight hair tied behind her square shoulders and zipped jacket.

“I’m calling the campus police,” she said.

I didn’t know what to say. I tried to remember the last time she had spoken to me, or if she ever did. “Why?”

Morgan Harper gestured about the room with her empty hands, apparently trying to muster her own outrage, flapping her hands as if stoking a flame. Something about the spectacle was funny, knowing I’d already won.

“I… wanted to meet your prolific family,” I explained, patting the tomb. Just to ensure they were dead.

Morgan softened and shapeshifted. Lifted her chin, laughed breezily. “Oh, I don’t think you were invited.”

Night’s sheet over me went sodden. I struggled to inhale. Lemon-spritz burning my fucking eyes.

Her words, my damnation.

Morgan came closer, and a chill shattered me. Her gaze, pretty and heavy, leveled with mine, and I realized that I was just an animal, and she was Other. Perhaps I knew this all along, that my attempted murder would do nothing, that her perfection was untouchable, tax-sheltered, pressed into a diamond of money and influence and power.

“I poisoned you,” I whispered. “You’re going to die.”

Morgan exhaled another laugh, seeming to float. She was perfect. She was in every movie, behind every glittering poster and screen. The American dream, undying.

I saw the future, then, in terrible glow. The hospital removing the heavy metal from her heart with Prussian blue. All I’d done was given her an indigo tongue and a cobalt-tinged shit. Cue the sitcom laughter.

Of all the things we didn’t learn in school, the most egregious was this: I could never win. I was just lichen on a statue, increasing its glamor of longevity and grandeur.

“Aren’t you afraid?” I asked.

“Aren’t you?”

Morgan gave a debutante’s smile, gripped the lip of the tomb, and vomited on my Oxfords.

And I found I could not move. Ghastly acid had melted my shoes to the floor.

She took her time removing a handkerchief to dab her chin, gaze cutting me long and deep as she turned to exit the mausoleum and call the police.